Pinterest bought a tiny startup to help people find what they didn't know they were looking for

Pinterest just made its 7th acquisition, scooping up the
two-person team behind the small startup Hike Labs for an
undisclosed amount.

Jason Shellen and Mike Demers launched Hike in June 2014 to build
social-focused mobile and web products. Since, the team had
debuted an app called "Drafty"
that tries to make mobile blogging a lot easier.

For Pinterest, the acquisition means adding Shellen and Demer to
its product and engineering teams, where they'll work on
discovery.

Tackling the discovery
problem is part of Pinterest's grand plan. The
company wants to fill the gap between an idea and a
specific search — to help people find things they didn't know
they were looking for or when they only have the faintest
glimmer of an idea. If Pinterest can nail visual
search, it can nail search advertising, and if it can nail search
advertising, it will be taking
on a market traditionally dominated by Google's
AdWords.

Shellen and Demer both have backgrounds in building publishing
platforms and communications tools. Shellen was a founding
member of Blogger and Google Reader and later led the relaunch
and rebrand of AIM. Demers founded a application development
platform called 9Astronauts and developed a visual blogging site
and app-building service as the CTO of YouSaidIt.

"As longtime fans and users of Pinterest, we're excited to
join a world class team with the goal of helping people around
the world discover, save and do creative ideas," Shellen said in
a statement.

Since launching in 2009, Pinterest has made a handful of small
acquistions, including Punchfork, Livestar, Hackemeter, Visual
Graph, Icebergs, Kosei, and now Hike Labs. In March, Pinterest
raised a
huge $367 million round of funding at a $11 billion
valuation, pumping it with fresh capital to make acquisitions
like these possible.